An 82-Year-Old Japanese Audiophile Searches for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Electric Utility Pole in His Yard

As a long­time record col­lec­tor (first because it was before CDs were invent­ed) and a bud­ding audio­phile (because vinyl does sound bet­ter than dig­i­tal, have at me in the com­ments if you must), I appre­ci­ate a good sto­ry about the search for per­fect sound. But Takeo Mori­ta takes it to a new lev­el.

In the Wall Street Jour­nal sto­ry above, we learn that the 82-year-old has installed a 42-foot util­i­ty pole next to his house. Why? To get that clean elec­tric­i­ty to his sys­tem, not that shared, filthy elec­tric­i­ty from a com­mon-as-muck util­i­ty pole. Elec­tric­i­ty is like blood, he explains, and the clean­er the blood, the bet­ter for the sys­tem.

Now this reminds me, while we’re here, to tell you about a show I once saw on Japan­ese TV and which I one day hope to see on YouTube. A news show pro­filed Japan’s num­ber one Bob Dylan col­lec­tor, who had every vinyl release of the musi­cian, even to redun­dan­cy. At one point he pulled out an album still in its shrink wrap that was no dif­fer­ent from the one next to it. “This has a green stick­er on it,” he said, point­ing to the right hand cor­ner. “But that’s just a stick­er,” said the host. Blank stare. Pause. “But this has a green stick­er on it.”

That’s the spir­it, I thought.

Also: Nev­er catch that spir­it, I thought.

This arti­cle at residentadvisor.net explores the world of Tokyo’s audio­phile under­ground, which is both a log­i­cal out­come for those into hear­ing the best music sys­tems and some­thing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese. I can’t imag­ine an audio­phile bar open­ing up in the States any­time soon. But the lis­ten­ing venue has a long his­to­ry in Japan:

It can be traced back to the rise of jazz kissa (jazz cafés) and meikyoku kissa (clas­si­cal music cafés) in the years fol­low­ing World War II, a time when import­ed records were pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive. This meant that, for many peo­ple, the kissat­en were the only places to hear good music from abroad. The focus at these cafés was on deep, con­cen­trat­ed lis­ten­ing.

As the arti­cle men­tions, there are as many mini clubs in Tokyo as there are gen­res, from clas­si­cal to drone/glitch. And it comes down to the idea, start­ed by Amer­i­can soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg, of “The Third Place,” the place that is nei­ther home, nor work:

As civ­i­liza­tion has advanced, going to work and back home has become our rou­tine as humans,” Ari­izu­mi says. “The third place is not quite home, and it’s not work, but a com­mu­ni­ty where every­one can be wel­comed and relax, with a nice atmos­phere. I heard about the term ‘third place’ for the first time just when we opened Bridge, and I remem­ber think­ing, ‘This is exact­ly what I want to cre­ate.’ That’s what I want to do, cre­ate a third space. Peo­ple can come here and talk about their jobs or their love life, or they can come here and dance. It’s a place between work and home. Peo­ple need that.

Ques­tion is, dear read­er: do you have a third space?

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out
The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.


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Comments (14)
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  • joesixpack says:

    Typ­i­cal audio­phile; Do some­thing expen­sive and showy which has zero effect on the qual­i­ty of your sys­tem, then claim to be able to hear an improve­ment. I’m sure he has Mon­ster Cables as well.

    The peo­ple who do this sort of crap are gen­er­al­ly the least knowl­edgable of elec­tron­ics and even sim­ple phy­ics. This sto­ry does­n’t belong here, it’s not cul­ture, it’s con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion being passed off as devo­tion to music. The king is naked. The mon­ey would hae been bet­ter spent on an intro to pysics class at the local junior col­lege.

  • Donalev Trumpski says:

    Or learn­ing how to spell physics.

  • joesixpack says:

    LOL, I got it wrong twice. Eff­ing fat fin­gers.

  • Ken Wright says:

    Lots of tests have been done with groups of peo­ple who have not been able to iden­ti­fy between cd qual­i­ty stream­ing and vinyl music. Not that it mat­ters one jot. Get the best you can afford sit back and enjoy the only thing that mat­ters. The music.

  • Fred says:

    I’ve lis­tened to high end audio and it does sound fan­tas­tic. I’ve nev­er com­pared vinyl records vs CD so I can’t com­ment on that. What I will say, is that vinyl wears out and it gets to the point that pops and skips just become too annoy­ing. Also, lots of the music I buy is not avail­able on vinyl, some is not even avail­able on CD for that mat­ter. Last­ly and most impor­tant­ly I can’t invest thou­sands of dol­lars in equip­ment for the few hours a month that I sit down and seri­ous­ly lis­ten to music.

  • jojo says:

    Your crit­ic of audio­phile becomes very com­mon amongst frus­trat­ed guys who can­not afford a cor­rect system,and can­not make the dif­fer­ence between two wines. You guy want to mea­sure to com­pen­sate for your inse­cu­ri­ty.

  • Mark Alfson says:

    I’ll par­tial­ly bite: why do you feel/believe vinyl sounds bet­ter than dig­i­tal?

  • Ted Mills says:

    See­ings this is get­ting some recent repost­ing trac­tion, and because I did say “have at me,” I’ll defend vinyl with some caveats: music that was orig­i­nal­ly record­ed, mas­tered, and pressed for vinyl (1950s thru 1990s, I’d say) sounds bet­ter on a decent vinyl sys­tem, espe­cial­ly if there are very few steps between the orig­i­nal tape and the press­ing. A lot of audio­phile stuff is woo-woo, for sure, and noth­ing real­ly makes a record sound as good as it does after smok­ing a joint (or your intox­i­cant of choice).

    So the ques­tion of “vinyl vs CD” (and these days vs high dig­i­tal stream­ing) is very reduc­tion­ist. Things don’t sound bet­ter *because* they are on vinyl. A Brazil­ian LP press­ing of a Bea­t­les album won’t sound bet­ter than a US or UK CD of same.

    Lis­ten­ing to ana­log cre­at­ed music on an ana­log sys­tem is a bit like look­ing at a land­scape. Lis­ten­ing to a dig­i­tal ver­sion of same, even in high qual­i­ty, is like look­ing at high qual­i­ty pho­to of same. Same objects, just flat­ter. That’s how I hear it.

    How­ev­er, mod­ern dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion does­n’t sound *that good* on vinyl. Some of it sounds very dead or flat, and I’m sure there are sev­er­al rea­sons for this (lack of spe­cial­ized mas­ter­ing, care, etc when it comes to the vinyl, etc.).

  • Mike Van In says:

    I call bull­dust on the “vinyl is bet­ter” asser­tion. It’s worse and can eas­i­ly be demon­strat­ed with a blind test. It’s actu­al­ly more of a pre­ten­sion than those who claim that valve amps have a “warmer” sound. Pure affec­ta­tion, again, eas­i­ly demon­stra­ble with a blind test.

    What is depress­ing is that peo­ple, who should know bet­ter, will defend their illu­sions just through pride. I once made some excel­lent cof­fee with cream, at work, and gave it a boost of Scotch. I hand­ed it to a Scot­tish lady who liked her tip­ple, but I said to her, “Just taste this and tell me if the cream is going off.”

    You guessed it! She said it was real­ly sour! But the kick­er is that once I told her that it was fresh cream, but had Scotch in it, SHE REFUSED TO BELIEVE ME — and then she got gen­uine­ly furi­ous with me because I near­ly died laugh­ing!

    Same as the “audio­philes” who make these inde­fen­si­bly dumb dec­la­ra­tions. Every one of them will hear dif­fer­ences in music sources, as long as you DON’T tell them you’ve been play­ing a sin­gle source all along. Sil­ly, harm­less, laugh­able, clots! I’m not going to argue with that breed.

  • Mike Van In says:

    As for that aged Japan­ese clown, want­i­ng his own util­i­ty pole, he could have got a 500% clean­er sup­ply by sim­ply run­ning his domes­tic pow­er through a rolled up 50 meter exten­sion chord. He’s too igno­rant to know that you can buy mains fil­ters any­where in the civilised world. This is only men­tioned because the music equip­ment he chose is obvi­ous­ly super-cheap rub­bish that has a pathet­ic pow­er sup­ply board for the elec­tron­ics.

    A hope­less fool, soon part­ed with his mon­ey, as he prover­bial­ly deserves.

  • Marcus says:

    Whew. The com­ments here have saved me from sign­ing up to read inter­est­ing things on top­ics new to me. Such hos­til­i­ty, so dis­mis­sive. “I’m right and every­body else is stu­pid”. I can get this kind of com­men­tary, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly supe­ri­or and igno­rant , just about any­where. No thanks.

  • Jared Lee Brandon says:

    There’s a fair­ly sim­ple expla­na­tion as to why vinyl can sound bet­ter. Vinyl is phys­i­cal­ly capa­ble of ren­der­ing fre­quen­cies beyond what a dig­i­tal source (CD, DVD, dig­i­tal tape) can repro­duce. The accept­ed range of human hear­ing is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, so that is the hard range of dig­i­tal audio. But vinyl can repro­duce sounds out­side that range. And though many of us can­not nec­es­sar­i­ly hear those fre­quen­cies (note, I said “most of us” because some can), we can per­ceive them through their har­mon­ic influ­ence upon the fre­quen­cies we can hear. Those per­ceived fre­quen­cies add rich­ness and dimen­sion to the audi­to­ry expe­ri­ence. The lim­it of this is when the source audio being pressed to vinyl is com­ing from dig­i­tal (as in new music or remas­tered music) it’s very like­ly going to be lim­it­ed to that dig­i­tal fre­quen­cy range. In that case, it real­ly does­n’t make much dif­fer­ence whether it’s on vinyl or not. But I’d be will­ing to bet that if you lis­tened only to a tru­ly ana­log record­ing of a song on vinyl for an extend­ed peri­od of time, and then switched to a dig­i­tal ver­sion, you would feel that some­thing was miss­ing.

  • Charles Shay says:

    Appar­ent­ly joesixpsck’s way is the only way in his nar­row view. Fact is, peo­ple with good hear­ing and fine hifi gear have a joy the six­pack­ers will nev­er know. Hi-end sen­si­tive audio gear CAN pick up irreg­u­lar­i­ties from elec­tri­cal pow­er. Most of “us” audio­philes sim­ply use a com­po­nent that fil­ters odd elec­tri­cal impuls­es and gives a steady clean source for your entire hi-fi to plug into. I can per­son­al­ly tes­ti­fy it does indeed aide the res­o­lu­tion of the sound. More pow­er to this gen­tle­man if he can afford it. Pret­ty pathet­ic that a non-hifi fan (who is obvi­ous­ly angry and uptight) feels the need to mock it. It’s a pret­ty harm­less hob­by. But I guess if one is unhap­py with them­selves they will defin­i­tive­ly be unhap­py with every­one else. Maybe a lit­tl qual­i­ty mudic woukd soothe the sav­age beast in the six­pack­er?

  • Charles Shay says:

    Appar­ent­ly joesixpecker’s way is the only way for every­one in his nar­row view. Fact is, peo­ple with good hear­ing and fine hifi gear have a joy the six­pack­ers will nev­er know. Hi-end, sen­si­tive audio gear CAN pick up irreg­u­lar­i­ties from elec­tri­cal pow­er. Most of “us” audio­philes sim­ply use a com­po­nent that fil­ters odd elec­tri­cal impuls­es and gives a steady clean source for your entire hi-fi to plug into. I can per­son­al­ly tes­ti­fy it does indeed aide the res­o­lu­tion of the sound and makes an audi­ble dif­fer­ence. More pow­er to this gen­tle­man if he can afford it. Pret­ty pathet­ic that a non-hifi fan (who is obvi­ous­ly angry and uptight) feels the need to mock it. It’s a pret­ty harm­less hob­by. But I guess if one is unhap­py with them­selves they will defin­i­tive­ly be unhap­py with every­one else. Maybe a lit­tle qual­i­ty music would soothe the sav­age beast in the six­pack­er? He could use it.

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